Within the limits imposed by his diffidence and his tastes, Cunningham had no reason to complain of lack of sympathy or confidence from Burns. When his first sweetheart jilted him with humiliating publicity, Cunningham told his sorrow to Burns, who had previously supplied him with a poor song in furtherance of his suit, and who now condoled in terms which bore hard on the young lady. The poet’s letters ranged from gay impromptu verses to the confession that as a result of the fiasco of the elegy, ‘I never see the name, Dundas, in the column of a newspaper, but my heart seems straitened for room in my bosom; & if I am obliged to read aloud a paragraph relating to one of them, I feel my forehead flush, & my nether lip quivers.’ On his part, Cunningham obtained for Burns the last national honour which Edinburgh conferred in his lifetime--election to membership in the socially exclusive Royal Company of Archers. And at the end Cunningham received one of the poet’s desperate appeals for help--not for money, but for intercession with the Commissioners of Excise not to put him on half-pay during his illness. Cunningham, moreover, shared with John Syme the credit for setting on foot the subscription for Jean and the children after Burns’s death, though his diffidence made him a poor collector of funds. Through diffidence, also, he permitted George Thomson to prepare for the newspapers the obituary he should have written himself, and by this neglect did injury to his friend’s memory.